Tanya Talaga shortlisted for prestigious RBC Taylor Prize
Toronto Star journalist is one of five finalists vying for the non-fiction award
The Toronto Star’s Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers about Indigenous teens who died in and near Thunder Bay, is one of five writers who have been shortlisted for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize for nonfiction.
A three-member jury announced the five finalists for the $30,000 award, to be handed out Feb. 26 in Toronto. That prize money has been increased this year from $25,000. This follows a trend in recent years to increase some of the most prestigious prizes, including the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, which doubled from $25,000 to $50,000 in 2017, and the Giller Prize, which jumped from $50,000 to $100,000 in 2014.
James Maskalyk’s Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine is also in the running for the Taylor prize. His book contrasts medicine as practised in a world-class Toronto hospital to the bare bones clinics in Sudan and Ethiopia. Maskalyk has already won the $60,000 Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston prize for this book.
Others in the running include Max Wallace’s look at the final days of the Second World War, In the Name of Humanity, and Daniel Coleman’s exploration of the Niagara Escarpment, Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place.
Also making the cut is Stephen R. Bown’s Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on Bering’s Great Voyage to Alaska, about the explorers sent across Russia by Peter the Great to seek a route to North America.
Talaga’s book has been a favourite not only among readers — it’s been steadily on the Toronto Star’s bestsellers lists since its release at the end of September — but also among prize jurors.
In addition to the Taylor Prize nod, Seven Fallen Feathers has been shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize; was a finalist for the 2018 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction; a finalist for the 2017 Speaker’s Book Award; and is longlisted for the 2018 Canada Reads competition.
Of her book, the jury said Talaga, the only woman among the five finalists, has written “an open letter to the rest of us about the many ways we contribute — through act or inaction — to suicides and damaged existences in Canada’s Indigenous communities. Tanya Talaga’s account of teen lives and deaths in and near Thunder Bay is detailed, balanced and heartrending . . . It is impossible to read this book and come away unchanged.”
Runners-up for the Taylor prize will each receive $5,000.
The RBC Taylor Prize was set up in 1993 to honour journalist Charles Taylor.